The Viking Chats: navigating the choppy waters of property, technology and business
Welcome aboard The Viking Chats—the podcast where property, tech, and business collide in candid, no-fluff conversations. Hosted by Kristjan Byfield—lettings veteran, proptech pioneer, and co-founder of Base Property Specialists and The Depositary—this show dives deep into the real-world challenges and bold innovations shaping the future of the housing sector and beyond.
Each episode, Kristjan drops anchor with industry leaders, disruptors, and entrepreneurs to unpack the messy, inspiring, and often chaotic reality of running a modern business in a rapidly evolving landscape. Expect sharp insights, honest stories, and the occasional Viking metaphor—all served with Kristjan’s trademark wit and big-hearted honesty.
Whether you’re in lettings, launching a startup, or just love a good story about navigating change—this podcast is your compass in the storm.
The Viking Chats: navigating the choppy waters of property, technology and business
Game of Homes: Winning in a Tech-Driven Market with Simon Whale
Hold onto your helmets, Vikings — in this latest voyage across the turbulent seas of property, technology and business, Kristjan Byfield welcomes a true industry legend (or should we say lovable rogue?): Simon Whale, known for his time at Reapit, his antics with Kerfuffle, and for generally causing "productive chaos" in the world of PropTech and estate agency.
In this epic chat, Kristjan and Simon dive deep into the fast-evolving landscape of property technology and what it really means for modern estate and letting agents. No corporate spin here — just honest, practical insight (and plenty of laughs) from two people who have seen the good, the bad, and the occasionally ridiculous side of agency tech.
Together, they explore:
- How "PropTech fatigue" crept into the industry — and why it’s finally turning into real, usable solutions.
- The evolution of the agent’s role: why technology should be your crew not your captain.
- The harsh truth about CRM systems, integrations, and why agencies must demand more from their suppliers.
- Why COVID was a brutal but necessary accelerator for technological change in agency operations.
- How AI is reshaping agency life — from marketing and lead gen to operational workflows — and why ignoring it could sink your business faster than you think.
- The myth of "people buy from people" — and why that phrase, while still true, needs a serious 2025 upgrade.
- Why customer experience (for clients and your staff) must now sit at the heart of agency business models.
- How small, independent agencies can (and should) outmaneuver the big corporates by being faster, smarter, and more adaptive with tech.
Simon also shares his candid (and very funny) stories about building Kerfuffle, life after selling Reapit, and why he believes the future of PropTech must focus less on flashy features and more on actual business outcomes.
In classic Viking Chats fashion, the conversation is unfiltered, irreverent and packed full of golden nuggets — whether you're a small indie agent, a growing network, or a corporate giant, you'll leave with fresh ideas (and maybe a few uncomfortable truths) about how you need to adapt your business for the years ahead.
Plus:
- Why building tech with agents, not for agents, is the only way forward.
- The importance of "getting your ship in order" before adopting new tech.
- How to turn grumpy customers and hesitant staff into your strongest advocates.
- Why many agencies fail at onboarding new systems — and the simple fixes that could save you thousands.
- A peek into the weird and wonderful world of early-stage PropTech innovation — and the dangers of buying into the hype too soon.
If you're serious about building a future-proof, profitable, and enjoyable business, this episode is your compass.
Whether you’re sailing calm waters or battling 10-foot waves, Kristjan and Simon give you the map, the mindset, and a few battle scars to help you chart your next move.
Set sail with us — this is one journey you don't want to miss.
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Right, welcome to today's Viking chat with the shy retiring guy you've never heard of, Mr. Simon Whale, and the second most shy retiring guy you've probably never heard of. This room's not big enough. Me. So, yeah, so we've got Whaley down today, and really we're just going to bounce around about all things prop tech, which is kind of the... So literally what we discuss every single day, but you've got this one on camera. And everything we've done over the last hour talking about what we've got on camera. Yeah. So, oh God, dare I say this, but for those who, I mean, for those who don't know where Whaley is, where have you been? But Whaley, if you could do it in as little as that 10, 15 seconds, who are you? Yeah. So it's the longest I was born in Kuwait. No. So what am I? I was, I suppose people would know me. What's the old Simpsons? 10 or 15
SPEAKER_01:seconds, Whaley.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, elevator pitch. Oh, okay. Is I was best known for being in the CRM game or state agency software, so people have known me best probably about my time at Reapit for the best part of 15 years. What did we do? We sold the company out seven years ago now. Set up Kefuffle as a way of helping agents and suppliers find each other and have a kind of marketplace backed up by reviews and everything else to justify who the best suppliers are. Of course, depository do extremely well on that front. And then I'll pretend it was strategically, but we've got a little group now because either through brilliance strategy, or accidentally, we've, yeah, we've got a few different companies. So we've got View Agents, which helps out what they call reputation software, helps you with reviews on any platform, Google, you know, Trustpilot, Facebook, whatever. We have the Relocation Agent Network, which is a group of over 750 agents working together collaboratively, earning money from out-of-area referrals, getting better deals from suppliers and things like that. And then finally, because it's quite more rich buying loss-making proptechs, is we got Unisuit, which was the global, I suppose, PropTech provider. If it scares agents in this country that there's over 1,000 suppliers in the PropTech space here, Unisuit has over 10,000 on it. So just think about the horror show of that. And so that's all starting together. And actually, although it's been square pegs in round holes, they're all fitting together quite nicely and working together. Nice. So, I mean, PropTech... As we know, some agents will instantly cringe at the mere word. I think fewer now than maybe five, six years ago. I think COVID definitely helped nudge some of those. It accelerated it, didn't it? It nudged those people, didn't it? Those who were sat either on the fence or sat in the camp of it ain't broke, don't fix it kind of thing. It definitely got some of them off the fence, didn't it? It forced a realisation about operating realities when you're faced with a crisis like that. And then also, I think by doing that, it has kind of forced people to relook at their businesses. And I know, you know, obviously, kerfuffle, this is your bread and butter every day. But, you know, I think what's been refreshing the last few years is talking to agents who have been slowly working their way through their entire business, top to bottom, and looking at every single thing that they do and how they do it and how they go about it and how they can make that better. So PropTech, I mean, obviously PropTech, a bit of a label that was put in it, like you said, were part of Repit for about 15 years, sold that, you said, roughly seven years ago. Yeah, can I just say as well, just on that property thing, it is hilarious. So I heard from one, it was a mergers and acquisitions expert that was, you know, when we were just going through the process, and they were talking about, you know, obviously if you put PropTech on there, you're going to, you know, get a bit more attention for the multiplier and everything else. So I very cleverly said, you know, we need to start relabelling ourselves. First of all, PropTech, and then secondly, CRM. You know, many agents still don't really know what it's a agency software. And I think I did it at classic timing from my point of view. I started calling ourselves PropTech at the point where agents absolutely started just rolling their eyes as you did that. Oh, God, you're not from PropTech, are you? One more listing and everything else there. The only thing I would say, and it is justified, the ivory tower, I've spoken endlessly about why what I've termed PropTech 3.0 works so well. People like yourself that have been frustrated with the fact that there aren't technical solutions out there, so you have the ability to much more easily these days to be able to do that. But because you know and live and breathe at the coalface, that horrible phrase, minimum viable product, is much more home to be able to get out there. That's it. I think you understand the realities, right? You understand the complexities of it, because I'm sure you've seen many of these. I see less of them now, but thinking at the peak of hype, prop tech term... I'd regularly have people reaching out, and it was that common story of, and typically it was in the rental space for us, so it would be, oh, I had this terrible experience as a tenant, or I had this terrible experience as a landlord, and I felt it was completely broken, so I've gone out and I've fixed it. And either that fix meant trying to remove agents entirely from the process, which was quite often a theme on a first attempt cycle with a product, or it was, yeah, we're going to plug this in, and we're going to totally transform your business. But we've never worked in your industry and we've never worked in your business and we don't actually understand anything that you have to do or the machinations of that. But I'm sure it'll be fine. But I'm sure it'll be absolutely fine. And you'd be presented with products that... The foundation, the idea behind it... There was something there. Having a crap experience is something... Let's face it, that's how all good products and businesses come around. Someone has a or a repeated crap experience and gets to a point where they go, surely it doesn't have to be like this. And you go about fixing it. But I think the nice thing... The solutions that really work are people who, as you say, are either already in the industry and feel and think that way, or someone goes, I'm going to change this, but before I do, I'm either going to go and immerse myself in it for a year, or I'm going to find a business partner that gets it. Yeah, to engage with those early adopters. One of the interesting things, I knew we were going to be quite popular with smaller agents who don't have the time, energy, they don't have procurement people or operations managers, directors. What I've been surprised at is how many corporate clients we've got and larger clients. And the same is true for them. They still only have enough hours in the day. There are too many prop tech suppliers out there to do them all justice. And so what they're looking for from us is that they want to get to the tech at the most exciting stage, which is just beyond guinea pig stage. So you don't go through all the pain of doing it. You know you're going to get the best deal in the marketplace and you're going to have the ability to hone the product as well. Have a bit of say in where it goes, shaping. Exactly, a bit of ownership there. And then the critical thing is you're not doing, you know, the worst time to adopt it is just because every one of your competitors has it, isn't it? So that's when it's not particularly good. So that's where we try to do is we try to encourage as many early adopters, but not the guinea pig stage. Yeah, I think it takes a very unique agent. with, like you said, a strong business model, a strong mindset, and a very clear understanding of what problem that product's trying to solve that is willing and able to get involved in that early stage stuff. Well, let me turn the tables on you as I'm one to do. I mean, let me just ask you, so obviously it's hard building the product in the first stage. Yeah. What is the next biggest challenge, though, is moving it from your own business to another business, isn't it? Yeah. Because I know we've been guilty in many different businesses I've dealt in where you kind of think, I've done the Steve Jobs, haven't we been brilliant? I've really been brilliant. We tell the world, you know, look at our brilliant release and glory in it. And then just like you said there, yeah, that is good, but we need it to do this. We don't work in quite that way. And it's much harder to roll back at that stage, isn't it? Where if you just engage with those agents at an earlier stage, you could have built that necessary configuration and customisation. Yeah, and I think, look, I think we learned that. I mean, look, we came into it knowing that to a certain degree. I think coming in to So I find the letting space really fascinating from a tech perspective for two reasons. I think when you look at it from tech as an opportunity, lettings, there's a lot of regulation and compliance. And there's a lot of things that you have to do. And so that side of it lends itself to in that there are certain things, there are certain processes you have to go through. the complexity with that is because it is an industry where you all have to do so many of the same things what you then have is the order or the way in which an agent facilitates those becomes part of that company's identity yeah that's the that's the bit that defines you as the dna isn't it really and that's where you get tricky and and and I don't think they'll mind me saying this because they're a radically different platform now and they've come an insanely long way. But I think that was something I learned when Richard first launched Goodlord. On the surface, beautiful product and I could totally see what he'd gone. He'd had his experience in Foxton's and he was like, there's got to be an easier way to do this. And he was absolutely right. And I remember him coming and pitching it to us and it was a beautiful looking product, but there was... zero customization it was that we've decided this is the best process and you adopt this is the process and you you know at the time you had to use their tenancy agreement you had to use their referencing in it and it was locked in and there were no there were no iterations to it at all and whilst it was beautiful it made you as an agent go yeah but that's not how we do things and i think yeah and rich rich's pushback at the time was like yeah but this is better and it's like yeah this is what you you think is
SPEAKER_01:better.
SPEAKER_00:I'm not sure I agree. And also, something you touched on in a comment earlier, if we are all forced to adopt an exactly identical product, where do we how do we become a different business at the end of the day if we're all using the same 10 products that mandate we do it in exactly the same way are we literally just a white label agency let me play devil's advocate or as i call it making myself more unpopular with estate agents than i already am there is there is by the way that is true and i think the only thing worse than you know is all those uh and that wasn't in his case but principles of businesses they know it has to be like this there are some very well-known ones there we just put people's noses out of joint what i would say is it's not and it's kind of the world's smallest violin stage when people start thinking about poor old prop tech but if you divert yourself building customization after configuration option you're never going to drive the product further forward so there is the thing about trying to find your perfect kind of clients because otherwise the product doesn't develop further forwards in the way that it could do and that's quite a difficult thing to get yeah it's it's definitely finding that balance and look we've we've definitely learned that that lesson like we do a lot of listening at Depository we do a lot of listening to our agents and you know we do a lot of listening to people who aren't yet with us you know how do we get you on board really like we always like that by the way because that's all some of the very best businesses I do almost do pre-adoption pre-project stuff before they've actually got it on there so that that puts a lot of faith into the business that this is you know you'll hear it yourself I'm sure and certainly I've heard it in the CRM space where Jesus you know we don't get this from our current provider I think the thing is I think we got our fingers burnt a bit early days and i think maybe because we were one of the first to really be doing it to to say right you like it yeah but it needs something for you to come on board what is that tell us what it is um and i won't name the agent there's there's a good independent london agent that we signed on quite early doors um on the premise that there was a very particular piece of functionality that they wanted built into it and we were like Cool, fantastic. If we build that, you're on board, right? Done deal. Naivety, should have got the contract signed before that. But we went off and built it and came back to them four weeks later and went, ta-da! And they went, oh, um... Yeah. Next excuse. We didn't mean we'd adopt it now. We spoke about this before, didn't we? We said this, actually. One of the, again, agents that can sometimes be their own worst enemies is that lots of suppliers will be told, look, we're not going to have it. It's a brilliant product. We're only going to have it when there's an integration involved. And then they say the very same thing. Oh, I've done the integration now. And it's like, you know. Yeah, just got a few things on my desk. Come back to me in a month's time. There is a certain burden of needing to deliver on and stick with it. But, you know, I don't think you really need to go down the contractual route because then it feels like you're being closed anyway, isn't it? It's just live and learn and choose. I think one of the things that's fascinating, isn't it? And definitely one of the few things that I have actually grown up with or grown up at all over my life is that in the early days of growing a business, you're just desperate for getting anything, aren't you? Any clients on board or anything else. And then you realise through many pains Yeah, I mean, I'd say I've probably learned that more in agency than in software so far. I'll give you the list of that might change in the future you know like Uber where you get to review the client as well we definitely learned that in agency I think that was something that took us nearly a decade to learn in agency and it was only when we sat down one day as a whole team and really picked apart the business as we try and do at least once a year that we all discovered that there was like five or six clients on our books that were causing 90% of the misery in the company it's amazing isn't it and it was that epiphany moment of we went to the six of them and we wrote them a very kind of generic polite email saying you know thank you for your loyal customer the last few years however we feel like we're going in different directions it's not you it's me exactly it's not you it's me like we feel like you know maybe we're going different directions and we'd like to thank you for your loyal customer but we don't really feel like we're the agent for you and the fascinating thing was I bet your staff must have been so with that as a decision? First of all, the fascinating thing was that three of them, like, we basically either heard nothing or were like, fine, which kind of underpinned that it was absolutely the right thing. The fascinating thing was the other three came back to us, like, two of them called and one of them emailed, she was in Brazil, Within like 30 minutes of getting that email, I was like, what have I done? What do you mean? I can't work with you guys anymore. You're amazing. And it's like, cool. You need to understand that's not how you make us and our team feel. And those three clients became some of our best landlords. Well, you know, we're from the review world. And one of the most powerful things, without a shadow of a doubt, is turning around those low-star reviewers into advocates. Because then you've got that, you know, sometimes the ones, some of The very best clients you can ever have are the ones that said, I thought the grass was greener. And as long as you have the wherewithal to not say, I told you so, go on, do one over the else. And leave it with them. If those people don't deliver on what they say they're going to do, you have to give people a get out, don't you? Those ones, when they come back, though, because they can then really testify in a way that the vast majority of your client base probably won't. And that's it. Clients coming back. And we were talking about something earlier with depository we've been around long enough now. And agency being the rather closed, you know... Incestuous. Incestuous, thank you very much. That actually was the word I was looking for. Game of Homes rather than Game of Thrones, but that part is absolutely true, yeah. But yeah, you know, once you're in, you don't tend to go too far. And the nice thing we're seeing now is, you know, we're seeing people who use our platform more for a couple of years within an agency and then they move to another for whatever reason, promotion, fresh change, whatever. Yeah, and the nice thing is, you know, we typically will see within... We'll quite often get a heads up saying, well, by the way, don't tell anyone, but I'm just handing in my notice and I'm off to join this. And we'll either get like... And we'll quite often get, are they a client of yours? Yeah. And then we say... If they say yes, fantastic, brilliant, so glad to keep working with you guys. But the nice thing when we get no is we get, okay, leave it with me. And the nice thing is quite often within that first month, we'll have... them get in touch and be like, cool, I've got my feet under the desk now. Just wait for the right time. Yeah, well, I mean, equally, you know, no one walks into their new job the first day and go like, boom, you know what, we're changing. Or they do, but then they move quite quickly. Yeah. They bounce a lot. But yeah, no, we find, you know, once they've done that sort of first one, two, three months of really getting their feet under the desk and again, understanding that business, understanding that operation and getting the trust of the owners and their colleagues and blah blah blah that's when we'll quite often go right I'm now looking at how we improve the business. And, you know, one of the first things we want to do is get you guys in. And there's nothing lovelier than that. And we've had that for years in agency with base. There is nothing lovelier than a referral. The word of mouth, as we all know, it's overused, but it's overused for a reason. It's true. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising or marketing that absolutely is there. And some of the absolute key factors, as you will know, and anyone who knows has had a conversation with me, we will not be talking about the property market or any aspect you know void is only what goes on inside my head so I know literally next to nothing about any part of the process where I find get interested about the suppliers at least here though is I start to pay interest when I see when people are being you know reputations about what people say when you're not in the room things like being referred as I said that was one of my biggest lead sources people moving to anybody else people who are getting the rave reviews before they become you know the in And as you know, and I've shouted about it, even before Mr. Simon Ledbetter, Mr. Net Promoter Score there, you've been our Net Promoter Score heroes year in, year out, haven't you? Getting some of the absolutely high score from inception. And for those people that don't understand it or don't recognize it, it's very simply that you'll have seen it yourself where things like Apple Store rated from zero to 10 and that gives you a score. If you are positive, that is considered doing quite well. I haven't checked your latest one, but I know in the early days you were over 80 for a long period of time. That is off the scale. Okay. To be fair, so was Tesla, so it can show where it can go. But Apple has consistently been in the 60s and 70s, and they are held as one of the paragons over there. And the reason why this is absolutely vitally important and why some of the very best agents do Net Promoter Score as well is they have statistically shown that it has the closest link between Net Promoter Score customer satisfaction and long-term profitability. So you get these little nuggets of word-of-mouth... referrals and everything else going is, you've got a glorious future. Look, I think one of the fascinating sort of elements that I've always found at PropTech is the role that money and investment finance plays within it. Because it's an essential tool in there, absolutely. You know, I think... It's definitely part of that process. We made a very, very conscious decision not to go that route. Not to go down and just take the investment. Not to raise too early. Again, it wasn't... It's not that we're never going to raise. It's not that we're never going to take investment. That would be insane to say. And we do have some plans. But it was... If you're... If you go too fast too soon, I've seen great products and great ideas raise too much money too early. And first of all, they treat it like they've already succeeded. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. You've literally just fired the starting pistol. You've not won anything. You've just given away 90% of the business. But also it places immense pressure on the business because no one is chucking three million quid into a startup business or more. At a time where you need total focus on the business. Exactly. And I think, you know, we did a lot of thinking about when we were starting the depository and we looked at our experience with suppliers, just generally, not just tech, but generally what did we like and dislike about suppliers and what at the occasional soiree that you and I go to, where we mingle with a couple of agents. It's about half an hour, isn't it? What, you know, what are the common things we heard other agents piss and moan about? You know, and so it was, you know, and the common things kept coming back. Like, cumbersome training, quite a difficult platform to wrap your head around. You know, costly onboarding, opaque pricing, slow support. Slow or almost seeming. Ticket systems. Ticket systems, almost slow, almost non-existent support. And, you know, something we already touched on, that, you know, not listening. Not listening, like going, this is what we're going to build. Even when an agent goes, no, we really need this. And like, oh, yeah, but that's boring. We're going to do this exciting thing. No, but honestly, we really need this. I've been banging the drum for the last few weeks on a separate thing, and it was one of Peter Knight's partnership groups where, you know, you go and listen to speakers. And one of them was really, really interesting in that they were talking about about the main reason why people, across all generic businesses, why customers leave. And overwhelmingly, I can't remember whether it was over 60% or 70%, but it was in that figure, people leave because they believe they're not being listened to. There's no empathy there. We only have to talk about the biggest supplier of all that we know here. I have no idea who you're talking about. Well, exactly right. But what's fascinating, and this is where I get so frustrated, is when we get behind the curtain with many good agents, that is the only reason is the only issue with it. It's the emotion. It is the emotion of it. I want to deal with companies that I enjoy being a partner with. And you know, if you've got the luxury of that. But in terms of what the actual product does for them and everything else, a lot of those guys are actually, they're okay with it. Yeah. And look, and I think also what we know, like emotions as well, it's all good to talk about data. And I think most agents up and down the country understand that data will tell them what they need to hear. But the reality is, A, a lot of agents don't really know where to start about picking apart that data. And a lot of, particularly the small agents, and agency is still dominated. by small operations. They just don't have the headspace or the capacity. Some of the 28 stats the other day that Paul and Katie, I think, were providing over there. And it is still something absolutely ludicrous, isn't it? Like 80% of the industry, one and two office agents. And what's interesting there is, of course, is the big ones are becoming Goliaths as well. So Commonwealth Countrywide acquiring, obviously, there. You've got Lowman going at it. You've got a franchise group. What's happening at the moment is you're having that really successful middle band getting devoured by the big companies. In my day, back in, you know, doing the old Uncle Albert and during the war kind of thing there, you'd have this, and it has been the changing of the industry and I haven't found it particularly enjoyable because back in the day you'd have this rump of mid-sized agents where, you know, they would be market leaders so it was really worth donating time and energy. They weren't big enough so that now you might not make any margin. But of course, those have been the mergers and acquisitions targets. Yeah, and I think, like you said, they're a really exciting band of the industry as a supplier like you said because they're bigger than ever before now they're big enough as a supplier that they're worth pursuing that they're commercially viable for you as a client they tend to be small enough that they can still make pretty quick decisions yeah nimble you know if they yeah if they want to you know if they decide I like this let's try it you know you can be signed and onboarding within you know two four six weeks you haven't got to wait for the next fiscal year or some escalation to the board or you know So triple sign off with a devil's stone. So yeah. And it's, it's, it's, it's interesting. It's kind of bittersweet at the moment to see. But look, it makes sense. It makes sense. The way of the world, isn't it? The way of the world is going. You can bemoan that as much as you want to. But what that does leave you with is a really interesting two-tier approach, isn't it? You've got to either decide to ignore the enterprise blue-chip end of the marketplace or you go for the SME side of things. But then it's very difficult to target all of those guys effectively. But I think also it represents new opportunities, right? Because... Those businesses being acquired and the main acquisition businesses at the moment have all made it very clear they are not slowing down. They've all got deep pockets and they're going to keep going. As long as there's a multiplier in that recurring income. It represents an interesting opportunity as a supplier because you might be going to the big CEO head office, big brand, trying to bang on the door and basically getting told, yeah, not now. But... If you're embedded within a quality business that they acquire and you suddenly come into this business and you have this respected business that this big company has just spent 5, 10, 20 million quid acquiring. It's a de facto trial. And they turn around and go, well, oh, why do you use that? You get rid of that, there's going to be problems. We love that. Oh, why do you love that? Well, this is why we love it because it does this and does that. Before we did this, we had to do all this. And now... you know, and we started using it two years ago, and by now it does this, and we know this is coming down the line. A very well-known brand that you have brought on board, it'd be wrong to talk about acquired another one, and I know for a fact that's actually what you're able to do, aren't they? They're able to run with it for a period of time, with the new processes of the acquired company there, and as you said, it's absolutely spectacular, they can say, actually, if we then leverage that back into the business and got anything like it, so that's where it does get quite interesting, and obviously there is a, the opportunity for suppliers is, I think also if we look at as entrepreneurs build as agency entrepreneurs building agency I think it's I think it's healthy for startup agents to see that there is this healthy mid-market area of, you know, not every agent builds a business, builds an agency to sell it. Absolutely not. There are those family businesses and some just haven't even thought that far ahead. But I think for some, there is absolutely this thing of, you know, I can remain a small cottage industry business and that's absolutely fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But if I want to have a 10, 15, 20 year plan, I know, I get my business to that kind of size portfolio or turnover or whatever, then I become target number one for those five, six acquisition things. And there's, that's my strategy. The strategy of, you know, what's definitely happening now, I've noticed it more on the supplier side, but it's definitely happening more in agencies. The days of opening up and you know what, you know, I'm just going to see how it goes. You know, there's a lot more people that are very, very clear about I'm doing this for three years. I'm coming in and getting out. And because of the professionalism now of of mergers and acquisitions. You know, actually you can do that and it's very, very clear. You know roughly what the multipliers are going to be. I thought it was really interesting. She's not a lady I know well, but I saw Chris Webb announce today a lady's come on board that he's kind of partnering with on the letting side of consultancy who had built and sold her agency and so was kind of brought on board brilliantly as someone who's been there and done it. And I went and looked into it and it was Vesta Lettings in Essex I think the lady's name is Christine. I'm really sorry. I've forgotten her name. But that was really interesting to see because, I mean, from LinkedIn, I didn't spend hours on it, but it looked like that business was only about three years old. So, you know, they'd come up with the idea. They'd done the concept. They'd obviously achieved some decent growth during that time and then gone, cool. And this is a letters business. That's really hard to do, you know, to build up that from a head of steam, isn't it? What I think, yeah, it is really, really interestingly that whole approach there to be able to understand what you want to achieve and get out. The problem is, of course, is the speed of acquisitions are going so much quicker than the growth of agencies. What I mean by that is, over a period of time, you'd expect those one, two, three office agencies to go to four, five, six. They aren't growing at a speed. There aren't mergers happening quick enough so that that rump isn't growing. It is actually shrinking back. Look, I think one challenge of that is the fact that agency growth And it's interesting, in London I think you're starting to see a marginal shift back, but largely in agency now, the value's in your lettings and property management book, right? And so that is where the value is, and part of the reason that value is there is because landlords are quite hard to lose. They're quite hard to get, but they're quite hard to lose. Once you've got them, they're sticky. You know, it's a bit like banks. As long as you're all right, you don't have to be perfect. As long as you're doing a right job, and you don't run into any major problems. I despise Barclays, and genuinely, this is how pathetic I am. I've had so many, you know, their systems when they went down endlessly. The simple reason is because I memorise and know my sort code and account number off Barclays, because I've been with them since 11, prevents me from moving. And that's pathetic, isn't it? And if you think about that so they have to absolutely drop that and that's for a bank where you couldn't take your money out which most people would kind of say that was probably you know kind of the von seal part of the agreement so it's amazing so So we don't end up talking for like five hours. Let's drop in a few other big bits. I don't think we can remotely dance around the topic of tech at the moment without talking about the all-encompassing AI. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? And again, you know, let's use the groundbreaking and everything else. For me, it's really, really simple at the moment. AI has been just spectacular and it's one of those ones that nobody, although, you know, machine learning was out there and it was doing some of the automation there, that excitement Explosion of it obviously was it now two years ago, whatever else it seems like a lifetime ago But when we let's be honest the vast majority what people are talking about 90% of it Plus has been about content creation has been about marketing what we are now starting to witness is going to be the stuff that that stuff's as great as it is is Literally frills and the cherry I think that stuff that stuff was like your your your Facebook. Yeah, it's stuff that is every bob and jane or across the world it's something you can pick up and play with for fun whether you're on a train and and i think for any substantial shift in tech or or any substantial kind of evolution in society you've got to have that kind of immaterial kind of buy-in from everyone first which then drives it then being more commercially driven you know we look at like i said i use facebook i threw that out there but i think it's a good one the whole thing of like you know it started off um as purely a a way to network online with your friends and family you know and there were i don't think there were any adverts in there to begin with and any of that stuff and now you now look at the the the cesspit in some respects that it's turned into now but um you look at that evolution and it you had to get the consumer buying and i think you're right like the the The stuff two years ago about, hey, look, you can ask it to make you a picture of a kitten riding a bicycle whilst wearing a Michael Jackson bad outfit. You know, whatever. That was fun. And that got the huge sweeping adoption. And what it also instantly made people do is go, wow. Like, that's nuts, because the speed it would do stuff. Yes, it wasn't perfect, and yes, they still can't do hands, and, you know, all this sort of stuff. Yeah, it's just bizarre, some of the stuff. But the speed, you know, and, yeah, it's fascinating. But like you said, where it's going, and it's, you know, it's this thing of, you know, it's the dumbest it's ever going to be. You know, as astounded as we are by where it is, it's only going to keep moving faster because the cleverer it gets, the cleverer it gets, and it's going to be teaching itself. The ability to turn numbers, massive numbers, into actionable info like that is the bit that is just insanely brilliant. The ability to upload spreadsheets, to compare those. So this is the thing, right? We touched on earlier. I think there's lots of agents, smaller agents up and down the country who... have data sat within their CRM, within their Zoopla and Rightmove accounts, within their whatever, they know there's something they can do with it. They don't really know what to do with it or how to do it with it. And I wonder how many have twigged onto the fact that here's your perfect resource. You don't necessarily have to action it, but I'll tell you what, why don't you extract five of your biggest data reports that you can out of whatever you've got, chuck it all into track gbt or gemini which you know whichever platform you're on and just go you know this is my business this is where we're at this is where i want to get to from the data i've provided to you what are the key things you think i should be doing you know and i think this is this is the fascinating thing like for me like the um the ability to do research and stuff like that the you know Your average person, even your average business leader, unless you're building a medium to large business, I think a lot of that stuff previously wasn't really on a radar. You wouldn't go, oh, do you know what? I'm going to hire a data analyst to look at this and extrapolate all of this so we can figure out. You're not going to do that. But guess what? You've now got a data scientist that is fantastic. for now, free. That you can just chuck stuff in and just play around with it and keep asking questions. It's a wanky phrase, but that democratisation of the tech is what we're talking about here. And you're talking about, I know at least a handful of agents, really forward-thinking ones, who did exactly what you said, took on a data scientist research, whatever else, 40, 50, 60K or whatever else there. And now, you know, they could justify it in their minds back then, but now, if you're going into it, this should be able to be open up to everyone. There is an interesting angle, though, as well. Whilst it is absolutely true that tools like ChatGPT, and you highlighted it there, whilst it's free or whilst it's cheap and everything else, there is going to be, again, a two-tier approach come here. Because obviously, as we know, AI works better with bigger data sets. So some of these larger companies, you know, the likes of Property Franchise Group, the Connells Countrywide, where they're going to be able to pour over that data there and what they're going to be able to do with that. When they figure out how to plug all of that data into an ongoing system. Yeah. I mean, wow. analytics when people are going to move, you know, or spotting opportunities. Well, we were talking about acquisitions, I mean, from everything. You know, what businesses to be looking at for acquiring prospects, you know. Team performance, market analysis, looking at where the opportunities are to pick up new clients, to go into new markets, all this sort of stuff. But you know the one for me that's really interesting, and it's actually a bit scary, it gets a bit, is it Black Mirror, isn't it? You know, dystopian thing there. We're moving less around actually what the tech can do, because let's be really honest, it's almost getting to the stage where you can do whatever you want, thinking about it. But then it starts getting into whether, just because you can do something, should you do something? Now anyone who's again seen me at a conference knows that I very rarely challenge myself on that. But The tech now with the ability to create, sorry, to have tools that will do outbound phone calls, you know, literally posing, you know, and I always think this is where they fall foul, where they pretend to be, you know, they pretend to be a person rather than saying I am the AI chatbot or whatever it is. suddenly you can unleash literally a boiler room style hell, phoning out your entire database set. Where's the legality of that? You know, where does that fit? I mean, telephone preference system isn't going to be able to... I mean, GDPR doesn't seem to get talked about much at the moment, does it? As I always joke about. And where the data silos are and all this sort of stuff. 5% of global turnover, as I said, is I haven't got any global turnover, but I'm missing the point a little bit there, I think, yeah. But I think that is where, you know, there's going to be some companies that are really, really burned with that. I think there's a real place for it in terms of... I myself, now that they've reached that stage, there's lots of people who... And a bad AI experience is horrific. On a chatbot there where you know they're dust on that chatbot to cut back on people answering the phones. Yeah, yeah. And gone for the cheapest one they can find. And awful, yeah. But I prefer to use a good chatbot than actually to talk to somebody because of the nature of multitasking and everything else. This is the thing, but also I think if you're... I think the fascinating thing with AI at the moment is how insanely accessible it is. And I think, you know, the only thing I would say, if there's any agents watching this who are on the smaller side of agency and you think that AI is in some way, you find it overwhelming, and I kind of get it. There are so many things happening at the moment. I think the fascinating thing is, for me, I've regularly come back to this thing about PropTech of, you should treat PropTech like it's a member of staff. Absolutely. So, you know, you don't hire someone in a new role. Like if I was going to hire a business development manager tomorrow, I wouldn't hire a BDM tomorrow. and put a desk in the corner and have them come in and sit them at the desk and not introduce them to the team, not introduce the team to them, not restructure the business around them, not embed them in our culture, our processes, our whatever. And it's exactly the same with tech, right? There are... there are at the moment, there are little to no products that you can sign up to that you can literally switch on and it will instantly create a substantial shift in your business. You've got to spend the time to be like, you know, and we, we, you know, we see that with, with our platform. We don't have it. No one else does what we do. And that is kind of a blessing and a curse in itself. Um, But, you know, we've had that over the years. We've had agents who think they want to change and who sign up. And then, you know, a month down the line, you give them a bell and you're like, guys, you haven't added any tenancies. Oh, yeah, yeah. We're just going to get around to it. Just going to get buy-in from this person. And, you know. two weeks later, four weeks later, you're checking in again. Guys, still, do you want us to come down? You know, like, depending where they are, we'll even say, if they're London, I'll even quite often be like, you know what, I don't mind sticking my face in. Maybe you've got working with something, isn't it? It becomes second nature, it becomes habit forming, but the hardest thing is breaking out of that comfort zone. And the biggest challenge is onboarding without a shadow of a doubt. But here's the thing as well is, whilst it's great to have something that works out of the box, actually, that's not great for the business as a whole because as you said, if everything works out of the box, there's no point in differentiation. So anybody can be like you can't they as long as they buy that software and look again it comes back to that whole ain't broke don't fix it i'm experienced i know what i'm doing i have my method i have my process i mean we we had we had one of the best experiences i've ever had with a user a couple of years ago um when uh megan yep um who's now at swindon home finders he's another client of ours was at haslam's great round clients great round clients and um you know and and They came to us, wanted to solve the problem of deposit returns. It was too slow, whatever. And we got better. They signed us up. and they were training up their team and one of their senior property managers pushed back so hard. She was like, no, you know what? I've done this job for 15 years. I can do this job in my sleep. I know exactly what I'm doing. It's not, you know, yes, it's time consuming, but it's not a complex job. And, you know, if I break my process, I'm not going to be able to follow it. And she pushed and she pushed. And full credit to Megan, you know, at the time, she was like, you know, You get on board. This isn't a debate. It's not a discussion. You do need to have those conversations. You don't pick or choose. You need good leadership within the business to go, I respect what you're saying. And do you know what? Use the platform properly for 90 days and then you come back to me and you're not happy. Then we'll have a chat. We'll have a conversation, yeah. But this isn't a democracy. We're embedding this. And do you know the best thing we had was about... about six weeks later totally out of the blue we had an email from the lady totally unprompted Megan wasn't copied in it hadn't gone to Megan and been forwarded to us we got an email to me and Carla going this has changed my life there you go I was worried and I didn't really get it and like it scared me because a lot of the stuff I do manually just kind of happened And we see that a lot as well. And that's the Luddite approach to AI, isn't it, as well? A lot of that is that initial, and look, there are going to be losers, and anyone who's pretending that there isn't in terms of AI, this is out of the box genie style there. There are going to be massive winners. There are going to be job losses because of it. As with any revolution, it's going to create more and better jobs, I would suggest, than by being able to do it. Did you guys previously, did you use CFP at any stage? No. But you'll have heard of it and remember it. It was the grand old daddy of lettings and accounts software. there, still used by loads of agents. And when we were moving people across, you know, from the account software on the repit side of things, and I know it happens with other packages now today, you would have, first of all, you just have, like that scene in Shawshank Redemption, you know, where, what's his name, is, the old fella's released, isn't he? He just can't cope with being out, he's been institutionalised. You can get institutionalised to technology in exactly the same way, and as you said there, it's really, really important to I always used to have a conversation with the MD before we went in, if we were doing a demonstration with the staff and say, look, I'm going to tell you how it works now. Often it will be, they'll start saying, oh, that's good. That's great. And then they'll start actually thinking, oh my God, this has the potential to replace me. Well, so this is the thing. I mean, we, I'm definitely not going to name them, but we did a demo three years ago with, with a very prestigious brand. And to this day, I did a demo to a room of their property managers. I think it was 10 or 15 property managers sat in there, their senior PM team. And to this day, it still stands out as one of the best, best received demos I've ever done. Literally, it was an hour of 15 people going, oh my God, we don't... have to do that anymore and like literally there were points where people were giggling in the room and i skipped out of that building i was like literally skipping down the road but i skipped out of that building like yes yeah like and i said to the day Best received demo ever. And I remember, I think it was a Thursday or Friday, and I was like, cool, Monday rolled around. Nothing from Tuesday, Wednesday. And I'm like, this is a bit weird. And obviously, you know, I'd already done the little follow-up email thing, which they'd acknowledged. And then by the Wednesday, I put a call in, and I was like, oh, you know, have you got a minute? And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I said, yeah, yeah, I just wanted to have a bit of a chat, because... you know, seemed to really go, go really well on Thursday. And they were like, yeah, yeah. No, we've had a chat with the team and they've decided they, they can't really see the value in it. They don't really see what's going to change. And the interesting thing I learned in that was that you said a, the fear.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I think they had clearly gone on that cycle of, Oh my God, this is getting rid of 80% of what we have of this job. Yeah.
UNKNOWN:Um,
SPEAKER_00:And then there was that realisation of that probably means that, OK, maybe not 80%, but maybe 30% of the people sat in this room are no longer needed.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And also the importance of making sure that you have someone else in the room. Like, we've always... I've always... focused on because it's a frontline tool. It's the thing that your property managers or your administrators use. We should always be demoing to them because equally, we've had it the other way. We've demoed to business leaders. They've gone, oh my God, this is amazing. And then you get all giddy and you put it in front of PM.
SPEAKER_01:They're
SPEAKER_00:like, no. And the PM takes it from them. But also, if I'd had a senior decision maker in that room when I'd done that demo, I'm adamant it would have been a completely different outcome. But because I didn't have a senior decision maker in that room and it was just a room of frontline people, there was allowed to be that like, oh my God, this is amazing. What does that mean? Oh my God, actually, this could mean this. Yeah, no. Mad. Yeah, it is. And it's a reality of it and you need to be aware of it and at least be able to approach the subjects and everything else. And that's fine. People are going to be, you know, people are going to worry about their job. They're going to look after their job. So off the back of that, you... You invited me to a chat about AI we did down in town probably about a year, 18 months ago. It was... We did it down. There was like a meeting we did it in. It was... I can't remember. It was like a cool tech company that... You sure that was me and not my ABBA-style avatar? No, it was definitely... I remember you invited me and Vicky Viveris to come down at it. And there was a few others in the room. And I think there's... There's something fascinating I find about the... Oh, Tapture, was it Tapture? Yes. So I remember, but one thing that stood out with me, and this is a bit of a contentious one for us to talk about, but I think, look, A, you really touched on something. There's a lot of pussyfooting around, there's the benefits of AI, but there's a lot of pussyfooting around the fact that there are going to be substantial changes. Like it or not, it is going to get rid of jobs. You know, certain jobs. And hiding or ignoring it is not going to change that. It's not going to protect your job. What's going to protect your job is learning how you leverage that to deliver your job so that if you're on a team of five, you're the one or two that stay because by leveraging that tool, you can now do the work of five people. It's a tech weapon of mass destruction. What I mean by that is, you know, it is still just tech. It's just doing it on a scale that has never been done before. But in the way that, you know, we would find it now, you know... Isn't it cute that people back in the day would have sort of looked at typewriters and then computers and laptops and sort of, oh God, what's, how are we going to, this is the same thing. I genuinely think this is our, this is our generation's industrial revolution. It absolutely is. It is going to be that seismic. It is, you know, the, the, the data entry people who sit in an office at the moment and, and, move data from one system to another or literally go through going, yeah, I've done this, I've got this certificate, now I've got this, I've uploaded this document. You know, with the greatest of respect, they are the horse plows, you know, of... modern industry whale oil you know it kept it going for hundreds of years whatever else there and then was in a matter of decades disappeared and everything else is it's just it look the famous this is a wave it's a tech wave coming and famously with waves you want to be on top of it rather than underneath it don't you there and i think the key thing that is just to come back to is and this is where it does get interesting is understanding and being at the heart of that good tech and good ai definitely personalizes whereas actually when tech is done bad you know with That experience we spoke about with the chatbots and everything else. Well, chatbots, yeah. I mean, you gave a perfect example of, look, you can go out there now, and you've been able to for years, go out and plug and play any chatbot, cheap or expensive, and it takes you through a very, and we've all used the bad ones, right? We've all used the all right and the good ones, but we've all used the bad ones where it's like, Jesus, why? Why have you got to go? Go away. The fascinating thing now is you go out there, It is so easy to get a chatbot now that you teach yourself. And it's beyond the Turing test. I mean, genuinely, some of the chatbots, I can't now tell whether it's a human or the other. Well, I mean, one I know, and I'm fascinated at the moment by open market AI. There's lots of, you know, depository. We're working on our first AI project. That will be out before summer and super exciting. But I think actually as an agency, don't worry. Us as suppliers will be figuring out how we're going to leverage AI within our products to make our products even better for you don't worry too much about that look outside of that space and look at what I think the open market AI place at the moment is fascinating because A, there is so much out there, but B, as we know, it's generally so freaking cheap. And you're not tied into big onerous contracts. There's usually little or no sign-up fee. There's a low subscription, or you can pay a higher subscription to get all the knobs and whistles. But again, you don't like it after a month. You can go, but go and play. But there's some amazing things. things out there there's um telephone one there's a platform called bland okay which is super cool and literally it's super clever the first thing you do you go on their website if you look up it might be bland ai but if you look up bland uh it's really clever you go land on their website and the first thing it says is put in your phone number and you put in your phone number click enter and it instantly calls you So you instantly get an experience. That's very clever, isn't it? What a strange thing to call it bland, though. Well, I can't... Well, it's... Yeah, you know, you're getting away from the bland, aren't you? I suppose. I'm just trying to get my head around it. But I think when you think about telesales calls and support centres that we have to call into and that whole... Yes, it's a human, but it's that whole computer says no attitude. They're following a script or whatever. Ultimately, the better thing about this is you're not in a queue to talk to them. if the staff have to work to a set script, then you might as well have a chatbot doing that set script because it's quicker, faster, cheaper. Get them to focus on the stuff that's better. You can even, you know, with a lot of these things, you can say, oh, I want you to have an accent native to where the person's calling from. I mean, this is how nuts this stuff is now. So that people align with it. I mean, we've seen that, you know, at the moment, it's still a bit sort of like when people are showing it and it's like, yeah, the fingers are all over the place and everything else. But in a matter of months, that's going to be, you know, video. quality or studio quality stuff and that that then frees it up you know so we're not talking about then having to be corporate so we're paying these big agencies and i think you know what's nice about this is this has brought me brought us around to to someone to talk about so i think there is a safety blanket phrase that almost every agent i know uses when it comes to any conversation around tech within their business and it is People buy from people... Is the biggest... Safety blanket... Like... Oh... Don't worry... Someone needs to sell Amazon that man... Tech can't... Yeah... Tech can't... No... It's alright... Like... Tech will help us... You know... Our process will get a bit better... You know... We can do this... We can do that... But... Tech's never gonna overhaul agency completely... Nope... Because people buy from people... And I think... Stop... Stop kidding yourself... Yeah... Because I think also... What you need to... What you need to tell yourself... Yes... People do buy from people, but in the long term, consistently, people buy from people they like, they identify with, and who are good at what they do. And you've still got to get in front of them. So if you haven't got the prospecting AI tools and everything else there, the communications tools, if you're not open 24-7 because that's what the AI allows you and everything else there. But when someone calls your office, if they have to go through a five-step, press one for sales, press one for, are you looking to buy property? Do you want evaluation? All this sort of stuff. Versus that, versus a seemingly real-life chatbot who answers the phone literally within seconds. You know, be honest about what your customer journey is experiencing. And also, you know, again, we talk about it a lot. Obviously, we're filming this on my one, but take that bloody device out of your pocket. You think the amount of things that 15, 20 years ago were seemingly impossible to have in your pocket. And now the entire thing. Kit that 20 years ago would have taken, you'd have needed a house to fill with. And you'd have needed a truck to move. But also look at that mother as well now. So these things. do far more you know famously the the computer in that phone is more than they had to land on the moon it has been on there for 60 years the irony is there are less calls being made on these devices than ever before. And if you're not going to get your head around where, you know, Y generation or whatever, I can't even get my head around it, is there. They are using them less as telephones now than ever before. This omni-channel approach, a wanky phrase though it is, is here to stay. And I believe that's... And again, you know, again, this keeps chipping away at these kind of rather stale mantras that we have within agency of people buy from people and, you know, you've got to pick up the phone. Yeah. If you make enough calls a day, if you do enough appointments a day, all this sort of stuff, you've got to get up. That era of agency, that era of interaction in any business is dead. Can I give you just one example where I can think really, really obviously about this? It's lots of agencies. If you're doing your Josh Feig and your Power Hour, your prospecting calls and everything else, what typically happens when you've got the team doing that is one or two of those might be taking the incoming calls and everything else there. You might have a spillover facility out of to likes and money penny and everything else or whatever it is you Now you can have the AI just totally managing the incoming calls, they're dealing with all that and everything else, whilst those staff members are absolutely doing it. I've never seen an agent that can't be bettered by the right technology, even the ones that go down to it, as long as you're using it right. And what I can tell you now categorically is that if you use the right technology, AI even more so now, you will have a strategic advantage over everybody else that doesn't before they've even opened the doors even worse than that they don't have to worry about opening the doors because they're open 24 7 365 days a year i know i know i know there will be agents spewing spewing at what i just said about annoying i know they'll be spewing at what i just said about you know it's not about hitting the phones it's not about you know just getting people out of the road and booking appointments I'm sure there are agents still doing it. Yes, it still works to a certain degree. But if you really look at your business, if you really look at the results, and if you look at the data, God forbid, you will see that tapering. You will see, you know, I mean, I can see it now. I mean, I've been an agent now for what, 23 years? 24 years and and you know I come from that era where just before the portal started yeah and where we were and and CRMs were not the de facto particularly for startups because software back then was expensive if you could upload if you could upload to rightmove and do a match uh that was all you needed that's how I managed to make it find a property find a property back end was like your mini CRM back in those days but like you know we all had those applicant boxes and yes we all remember that and yes you would pick up the phone in new listings and you'd call through your 30 people and you'd speak to 20 of them and you'd get 10 viewings. Yes, it worked. We don't live in that era anymore. Most people have got less staff in the offices as well, so they're doing far more than they've ever done before as well. So unless tech's taking some of that heavy lifting, who's going to do it? And this brings us to another point you touched on really early on in this conversation, which is you've also got to think about the experience your staff have working with you. We keep talking about a crisis within our industry or growing into you within our industry, whether it's perception or reality of finding it really hard to get people to recruit into agency to get young minimum wage excited about coming into agency because guess what the young people of today who they said they don't even talk to their best mates on the phone they're not coming in to do aml checks they don't want to get on a phone and you can think whatever you think of it you can think it you know whatever weird and and sad and you know you can have whatever negative emotion you can about the fact that that younger people today generally don't like to talk to one another anywhere near as much as we used to at least not on a phone maybe more in person but it's still happening that shift is still happening so guess what if you promote yourselves to that young generation going hey guys guess what you're going to come in and five days a week you're going to spend four hours a day picking up the phone just calling people and doing that thing that you find so uncomfortable so you're going to lose out to the ones down the road or the industry sorry the industry will and this is and this is the thing and as an industry like you know these are things technology you know we have to embrace technology not just because it creates a better business not just because it can make you more profitable but also because this is what people expect if we want to attract young exciting people into the industry and look they will bring ideas and concepts that we can't even wrap our head around because these guys are growing up with this stuff well they grow up with these tools that's absolutely second nature to them as well Ian Preston banged that on me didn't he he's been talking about it as well yeah yeah I saw him post the other day he did an interesting post basically kind of calling out agents saying isn't it fascinating how many agents want AI but are absolutely point blank refused to let AI book viewings yeah the mental ability and to be fair even you know I've heard even you know Miles Shipside was banging the drum I mean again from the right move perspective but that's so just so large I mean the fact that they need to obviously put things like WhatsApp on that site is you know that's a completely separate thing but Ian's point about it was you know by freeing up the crappier jobs, let's just say, and everything else, but also by being able to cut that, and the technology then cuts your cost base so that you can pay for the best talent when you need it to be, so when it's doing the dollar productive stuff, you've got the best people in there, that resonates for me, and I tell you the other thing as well is, you know, the generations coming through now, what they are looking for, of course they want wages, they like that, but they also want to work for the right company, more than any previous industry there, they want to know they have the right culture, they want I want to have them know they're doing the right job and everything else. So we know that the competition for decent talent out there is not going away. And guess what? A young, aspirational person does not want to come in your business and do something which is largely inconsequential. Where it is either success or fail. They want to feel they're adding value to it. We said before about businesses, one of the main reasons before is they don't feel valued and don't do it. Why should that be any different for staff and people? No, exactly. I mean, I've said it before, you try as much as you can Automate the ordinary to focus on the extraordinary. Yeah, that's brilliant. I'm having that. You took it off me, didn't you, that phrase?
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Whaley's phrases. Nothing is original, Whaley. I've got AI spying on you. You wait until I retell that like Del Boy and get it completely wrong as well. I'll tell you one thing, though. Can I just say as well? I think there is something there before I forget. One of the things that I loved about it, if I remember your origin story, and I do have some things through this amaretto stained brain, is the thing that I loved was if I... I remember rightly that you looked every single year and looked at the processes within the business. You looked at what was difficult, you know, what was causing hassles. Then you would look at actually, you know, did we need training? Is there tech that could help out? Is there available tech? And one of the main reasons the depository happened was there wasn't anything else out there. So it led you to do it. So really big part of that conversation. And I have to be honest, we dropped the ball a little bit off the back of COVID. We used to do this every year and off the back of COVID, we dropped it and we brought it back in last year. And I'm so glad we did. And yeah, like you said, we have a day where we kind of pick apart the business as a business. And that's not just me and Anne sat going, what are we going to do this year? How are we going to make more money? There's a very specific structure to that, which is we will sit down with every member of our team. And it's a small team, the seven of us. We will sit down and we will have a one-to-one chat with that person for roughly half an hour, for however long it takes. It could be 15 minutes, could be an hour, whatever it is. We talk for as long as we need to talk. We make our notes. Anne and I, once we've done talking to everyone, we then go and over lunch kind of pour through What resonated with each of us? What kind of stands out? But a really important part of that conversation, sitting down with each team, there were two really important questions that we would ask every single member of staff. What is the thing that makes you happiest in your job? What is the thing you love doing? Great question. And what is the thing when you wake up in the morning that makes you go, oh shit, I've got to do that today. Whenever Waley comes to visit the office. What's he doing here again? But it's really important. And I think we've learned so many fascinating things out of those two questions. A, we've learned that there are things people enjoy that we never had no idea. But also, we've had people who have hated... A tiny element of their job, which is actually like 10% of what they spend their time doing. But it has a disproportionate... But it had never come to us. It had never brought it to us. They just assume all that. They're just going to say, get on with it. Because it's just part of the job. They expect you to go, look, that's what the job is. Shut the fuck up and enjoy the rest of the stuff. World take out. Nobody's tuning into this. But yeah, look, yeah. So, so, but, but what was fascinating that came out of that is, yeah, these, these, macro learnings and as you say that was how Depository fundamentally came about this wasn't me and Anne or techie me sat in some black room going what hasn't been touched what do we do in 2016 we sat down and had that chat with the team and the fascinating thing was Every single one of them cited the thing they hated most as the deposit return process. There you are. And they all had different bits in the process. Like, you know, our admin would be involved with issuing the notice and coordinating the clean and the checkout. And then the property managers would have to chase the inventory clerk for the report and then decipher that and then, you know, relay all of that to the landlords and have that whole interaction and then go through the whole joyous thing of presenting it to the tenants and whatever we reaction they got from that. And actually when you looked at it, A, it was a hugely time consuming process. Again, when you looked at the vast majority of what they did, It was zero value. They either did it or they didn't, but they didn't add any value to it. When you book in a clean, you're not booking in a better clean. Super clean. You're not booking in a better checkout time. You're just either getting it booked in or you're not. If you send that tenant the here's what you need to do before you check out email, you either send it or you don't. And it doesn't help. And so the more we looked at it, and then we went out and we were like, is anything out there doing it? And we very quickly saw there wasn't. And then, you know, we looked at the CRMs a bit like, you know, are they gonna do this? And I think, why are they doing it? But then I think we took a certain amount of security from the fact of seeing what Good Lord had built And no one, no CRM has really leapt on replicating that. CRMs have to do so much. So much. They're specialists in generalism, don't they? So somebody who wants to learn that vertical bit and do it really well has that place. And to be fair to them, you know, the best ones, you've obviously got this fantastic repeat integration and everything else coming forward. It's like what you've got now is because they are much easier to integrate with, they've actually liberated out that functionality. So they're bigger as a result because of it. And that's what's really exciting when what it's done right and why we keep, you know, me are really passionate about let's get these you know let's get the integrations right everyone should have open apis that glue dog in terms of a zapier style integration tool that has to become a de facto part of our industry yeah for the benefit of everyone for everyone you know for the benefit of everyone stopping innovation it's stopping you know the single sign-ons and all that pain in the ass it's not just frustrating it's stopping businesses being able to get off the ground because if you again for us you know again you know we are still a self-funded bootstrap yes prop tech business and that that's challenging you know and we understand the value of integrated partners and we've got what 13 or 14 now and like you said we're about to do release our new Reaper integration which has been like a six month project it's a six figure sum that we've invested in building that and that's before we invest a penny in actually promoting it and maintaining it and everything else so you know these are big things and Yeah, you know, it's, it's, yeah, things like Blue Dog are going to be a seismic, seismic shift, and it's, but it's still fascinating. I've spoken to quite a lot of suppliers, prop tech suppliers within the space about Blue Dog, and it is really interesting. There is still, I think there's still a lot of education to be done around this. Because I've had some fascinating chats with prop tech companies that I really admire and respect. And then we've talked about it and they're like, yeah, I don't know. And I'm like, yeah, but how many integrations do you currently have? And I remember years ago talking to Brief Your Market. And at the time they had over 50. And I'm like, the money you spent. And most of those will be like, you know, one of those will be, you know, CRMs. If you're integrated with five, ten CRMs, dear God, what does that cost? If you're pulling in... know data you know what do those look like again the thought of the fact that you can get on and do exciting stuff with what that integration does rather than spend i mean like for example we've got seven i think seven inventory partners now integrated inventory partners now when i look at that resource that we've replicated seven times to fundamentally build the same thing yeah it's like what we're talking about before wasn't it you know you can concentrate on whereas we could have just gone guys it's there in glue dog it's there it's all specced there's the documentation bosh done and then that work that we've replicated seven times now we could have done Yeah. But take it back there. I was going to use the old Tom Pannis phrase when you were talking about that kind of review process. That's gold dust, mate. Although I might have done a passable impression of Vapu out of The Simpsons there. What I think is really, really important, I don't think there's anything more important you can do as a business. And when we're doing business consultancy with some of our agency clients, we do ask them in a very simplistic fashion to break down every part of their business. You can start off literally at top level in terms of departmental lettings, sales whatever else there then start drilling down more accurately so if you're looking at prospecting if you're looking at the you know all different angles and be really honest with yourself and score that out of 10 you know there and then that gives you as you said involve the staff on that stage and I think doing what you've just done there the best bit you know even better if what works well at the moment that's where because we're all so used to just getting on with this is the way we've always done it and that's not good enough these days and also I think out there I think a thing to remember is well like we're not we're not anti-people you know of course not you and I are quite the opposite we I love the people in this industry and actually much more so than when I started BASE. I actually had quite a skewed opinion of agents, although I'd been one for a few years when we started. Actually, my opinion generally of the industry now is... It's better and rounded now, without a shadow of a doubt. Yeah, for sure. And it is becoming a better industry. It is becoming better and tech will drive that further. And, you know, I don't want people to think that we're for one minute kind of caveating these strange kind of futuristic kind of neolithic businesses where you've got like three people working in them and it's a mantra of tech that does everything we're not for one second trying to do that at all but if you are really honest with yourself and you really look at each role within your business and you look at day to day what those people do and where they add value to what they do I think you will actually be horrified when you actually realize what a tiny percentage of time they actually spend moving the needle, adding value, adding expertise, giving clients that special touch because most of their time is doing some tick box bit of a process or some rudimentary like thing that, because you did it, they did it, and the next one will do it. And I think if we're really honest, and also, So what if we free all these people up? You know, like, there's this thing of like, oh, but you know, I don't want to free people up because I don't want to fire everyone. Who's saying you have to fire everyone? You can grow the business. You know what? Who doesn't want more time prospecting? And, but also, even if you don't, even if your aspiration isn't to grow the business, I can't think of anything lovelier than coming in the office and being like, do you know what? 80% of what the business does is chugging over. I get to hang out with five, six, seven people that I actually just like spending time with. We have some really interesting conversations and I hear and see them do moments of fantastic interaction with a client or problem solving or whatever that tech for the foreseeable future won't be able to do those special moments. And then the rest of the time you just sit and just sit in a room with people that you enjoy spending time with bouncing ideas around and getting stuff done. And is that terrible to perceive? No? Yeah, because you're a massive hippie, even though you've got the whole Viking thing, which I've always found amusing. But the key point is, let's just deal with this further. Unless you are sat behind that camera and say, well, actually, I don't have any spinning plates in your business. Shut the fuck up. It really is. We've all got so many, and the bigger as a business, you tend to have these projects that are just never finished, are they? I always found it really interesting when we dealt with Romans. I think they nicked it from Apple back in the day. They turned down more good ideas than they adopt, and I always really found that, I couldn't understand that. And I get it, because I'm absolutely worse. I'm like a Vesuvius of good ideas, but actually finishing them off is what holds me back, and that's so many else. And I think the biggest Achilles heel of business businesses in general, but definitely in agencies, it's so easy to be bad busy, isn't it? You know, you come at the end of the day, you say, oh God, what a day I've had. What do you mean? You've been on Facebook? Or me doing a TikTok or something like that. Oh, my wife always catches me. I come back and I'm like, what a day. She's like, so when did you get done today? I'm like, yeah. Well, nothing productive. I mean, I was very, very busy. Yeah. I am mentally exhausted. Yeah. And But yeah, look, I think that we've danced around quite a few nice bits there. So I think this is probably a good place for us to wrap it up. That's right, because we've got to meet Jaden. We've got steak to eat, damn you. Steak, yeah. We've got steak. Jaden's cooking the steak. So, no, look, I mean, Whaley, always a pleasure. Of course. We could... do this again and again. I look forward to seeing you back here next week. Yeah. Yeah, there you are, listeners. This is where you're going to find us. The weekly AI, AI waffle, waffle, waffle, waffle. But yeah, no, cheers, bud. No, thank you. Always a joy. Thank you. Money's going to be in the account by the end of the year. Yeah, hopefully. There's a few bits in there that have got some of you thinking and yeah, like it, disagree with it, lump it. Yeah, we know where you live. But yeah, I think if you're not starting to set up and take notice with AI. And if you're not looking to start up and set up at what, how your business is going to evolve, you know, the next three to five years are going to be a very, very tough place. I always love this, you know, making predictions and we should probably make one either way so that we can then edit it back and say we were right. But let's catch up in, let's say, three months time as well and see where this genuinely has changed. It would be quite interesting to look at, you know, from this micro point of AI and just say, well, you know, did much happen in that time? I think that's really fascinating to assess what's actually going at pace at the moment. Yeah, nice. Let's do it. Cool. Cheers mate. Thank you. Bye.
